The Man Who Loved Dogs (32 page)

On September 15, like a voice from the great beyond, he made himself heard with that cry: it was the warning that Lev Davidovich Trotsky was not giving up.

Even though the Exile had avoided mentioning in his statement the controversy with the Norwegian authorities and the humiliating events of recent days and he had dated it August 27 (the eve of his appearance at the court in Oslo), the ministry of justice forbade him in advance from making any written communications.

For that reason, although Lev Davidovich had been certain for several months that he didn’t have enough years left in his life to turn back the political current that had turned him into a pariah and the revolution into a fratricidal bloodbath, he decided to try to make his statement resonate as strongly as possible. To begin with, he ordered Puntervold to sue the editors of the Norwegian newspapers
Vrit Volk
and
Arbeideren
—the former Nazi and the latter Stalinist sympathizers—in hopes of breaking his seclusion and being heard in an open court. The lawyer presented the petition on October 6 and informed him that the process had been initiated to settle it before the month’s end. But October would go by without the proceedings beginning. An explanation arrived on the thirtieth: Lie had stopped the trial’s process, protected under a new provisional royal decree according to which “a foreigner confined under the terms of the decree of August 31, 1936, cannot appear as a plaintiff before a Norwegian court without the concurrence of the minister of justice.”

On November 7, Puntervold traveled to Sundby to give Lev Davidovich, on behalf of Konrad Knudsen, a beautiful cake to celebrate his fifty-seventh birthday and the nineteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Jonas Lie, the fascist head of the police guards, accompanied the attorney while he handed over the dessert and even said celebratory words to the prisoner, wishing him (he was so conceited that he did so without irony) many years of happiness. They then asked Lie for a little bit of privacy to celebrate the unanticipated gift. As soon as they were alone, Natalia cut the cake and they extracted a small roll of paper. Lev Davidovich shut himself up in the bathroom to read it. Knudsen knew that, in the last two months, this was the story that most intrigued him, but it was only very recently that he had managed to learn the details that he was now revealing to the Exile in tiny script, doing so without adjectives and with many abbreviations.

According to Knudsen, on August 29, three days after Lev Davidovich was confined in Vexhall, the Soviet government asked Trygve Lie, who
was substituting for the minister of foreign affairs, to throw out the political exile, since he was using Norway, they insisted, as a base to commit sabotage against the Soviet Union. The extension of his asylum, they threatened, would cause the relations between the two countries to deteriorate. Lie declared that when he shut Trotsky away on August 26, that request had not been made to him yet, and therefore no one could accuse him of having confined Trotsky due to Soviet pressure. Nonetheless, Yakubovich, the Russian ambassador, made sure to comment that several days before, when Lev Davidovich had given an interview for
Arbeiderbladet
, he had verbally conveyed that same message to Trygve Lie. On that occasion, the ambassador had threatened a political crisis and even the rupture of economic relations. The Norwegian fishermen and sailors, conveniently up to speed on the dispute, feared a reprisal that would harm them, and Oslo ceded under the pressure and assigned Lie the role of suppressor. It was then that the minister proposed that Trotsky sign the declaration of submission to him with which Lie hoped to appease the Soviets, but upon not achieving Trotsky’s cooperation, he was obliged to order the confinement in Sundby.

Armed with the invisible ink, Lev Davidovich began to prepare a letter to Liova and his French attorney, Gérard Rosenthal. Feeling free of any commitment to the Norwegian politicians, he relayed the details and causes for his isolation and asked his son to step up his responses to Stalin. Now, more than ever, he knew that the only possibility for him was not to surrender—that silence could only result in the victory of the puppet Lie, with Stalin pulling his strings.

By means of the radio and the few censored newspapers that he was allowed to receive, the captive tried to keep himself up-to-date on what was happening beyond the fjord. With a few drops of bitter satisfaction he learned that, just as he had forecast, in Moscow and in the rest of the country the arrests of real or fabricated oppositionists continued. Among those who had been falling was the infamous Karl Radek, just after he had called for the death of the “super-bandit Trotsky” in the press; he also found out about the arrest of that wretched Piatakov, who had thought he had saved himself when he declared that Trotskyists had to be eradicated like carrion. As was predictable, at the end of September, Yagoda had been removed from his post as the leader of the GPU, and this role had been assigned to an obscure character named Nikolai Yezhov, in whose hands Stalin placed the baton so that he could conduct in a new chapter of the
terror: Lev Davidovich knew that in Moscow they needed to organize another farce to try to fix the botched August proceedings and to eliminate accomplices who knew too much, such as Yagoda or the infamous Radek.

Another one of his focal points of interest was the development of the war in Spain, which could turn following Stalin’s recently announced offer of logistical support to the Republic. But it didn’t surprise him to know that along with the weapons—even before them—Soviet agents had traveled to Madrid, establishing guidelines and mining the territory so that Moscow’s interests could flourish. Despite the devious nature of that operation, Lev Davidovich thought how much he would have liked to be in that effervescent and chaotic Spain. A few months before, when the nature of the Republic was defined with the electoral victory of the Popular Front, he had written to Companys, the Catalan president, asking him for a visa that, a few days later, the central government roundly denied him. In his way, Lev Davidovich begged for the Republicans to resist the advance of rebel troops that aimed to take over Madrid, although he already sensed that for the Spanish revolutionaries it would be easier to defeat the fascists than the persistent and creepy Stalinists to whom they had opened the back door.

The good news that Knudsen had won the parliamentary elections in his district reached the fjord, reinforced by the release, surprisingly allowed, of
Le livre rouge sur le procès de Moscou
, published by Liova in Paris. Lev Davidovich confirmed that the pamphlet managed to show, in an irrefutable way, the incongruities and falsehoods of the Moscow prosecutors while it warned the world that a trial where no proof is presented, based on self-incriminating confessions of prisoners detained for over a year, could not have any legal value.

The best news for the deportee had been confirming that Liova, when the moment came to make decisions, was also capable of doing so.

In the letters that his son had sent him, before and after the publication of the
Red Book
(letters that Puntervold tried to recite to him from memory), the tension the young man had been experiencing, especially after the August proceedings, filtered through. While the trials in Moscow had had the positive effect of bringing old comrades like Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer closer together and disposed to come out in defense of Lev Davidovich, it had also unleashed in Liova a feeling of being trapped that wouldn’t leave him and that led him to worry that he could be kidnapped or assassinated. His situation had become complicated by
the exhaustion of funds to pay for the printing of the
Bulletin
and by family tensions, given that ever since the political rupture with Molinier, Jeanne was saying she felt closer to her ex-husband’s position than to that of Liova and his father. Nonetheless, his greatest concern, the young man insisted, wasn’t for himself or his marriage but rather for something much more valuable: Lev Davidovich’s personal and historical archives, kept in Paris. Liova had managed for part of these papers to be donated to the Dutch Institute for Social History, and at the beginning of November he had handed over another part to the institute’s French branch. The rest, which contained some of the most confidential files, he had placed under the watch of his friend Mark Zborowski, an efficient and refined Polish-Ukrainian whom everyone called Étienne.

Very soon, the matter of the archives would prove to be more than an obsession of Liova’s when, with the new packet barely handed over to the institute, what he had feared so much occurred. On the night of November 6, a group of men entered the building and took some of the files. To the police, it was clear they were dealing with a professional and political operation, since there were no other valuable objects missing from the place. The strange thing was that the burglars had known about the existence of a warehouse that was known only to people in whom Liova had absolute confidence. Furthermore, if the burglars knew about that secret paperwork, why did they enter the institute and not Étienne’s apartment, where the most valuable documents were kept? Liova accused the GPU of the theft, but, like the fires in the Prinkipo and Kadıköy houses, his father perceived that a murky story was hidden behind it.

On November 21, Puntervold put an end to the weak hope of the Trotskys: U.S. president Roosevelt had once again rejected the asylum petition submitted by Lev Davidovich. Their last alternatives were now the improbable request by Andreu Nin as a member of the Catalan government that he be received in Spain and the one Liova had initiated through Ana Brenner, a close friend of Diego Rivera’s, for the painter to intervene before Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas so that he would grant Trotsky asylum. For Lev Davidovich, the possibility of going to Mexico—perhaps the most realistic one at that moment—was disquieting: he knew that in that country his life would be in as much danger as if he lay down to sleep naked on the coast of the frozen fjord of Hurum.

At the moment of his strictest confinement, Lev Davidovich received a visit from Trygve Lie, whom he had not seen since the beginning of the
crisis. Lie brought some provisions sent by Knudsen, including a bag of coffee that Natalia opened and began to prepare right away. After drinking the beverage, the minister told the captive that he had come to tell him that the trial against Quisling’s men would take place on December 11. Lev Davidovich couldn’t suppress a smile. Would he be allowed to speak in public? Trygve Lie averted his gaze and told him that the trial would be held behind closed doors. Although Lev Davidovich felt himself bursting with anger, he managed to calm down and asked the minister if in the morning, as he looked into the mirror to shave, he wasn’t ashamed to look into his own face. Lie turned bright red, but he waited a few seconds before reproaching his guest’s ingratitude: being the politician he was, he should know the demands that politics often imposed. But the other man’s clarification was immediate: Lie was a politician; he was a revolutionary . . . Or was Lie willing to endure for his political principles what he had for his? he asked, and Trygve Lie stood up, convinced that he should never allow Lev Davidovich the ability to speak in an open courtroom. Nonetheless, in an effort to revive some goodwill, the minister reached into the pile of books on the table and lifted a volume of one of Ibsen’s works:
An Enemy of the People
. Lev Davidovich saw the opportunity to comment on how appropriate that work was in his current situation: Stockmann the politician who betrays his brother was extraordinarily similar to Lie and his friends, and he recited a passage from memory: “It remains to be seen whether evil and cowardice are powerful enough to seal the lips of a free and honorable man.” He immediately bid good evening to the minister and held out his hand so he would return the book to him.

Without looking at the confined man, Trygve Lie replied that there were many ways of sealing lips and even sealing off the life of an “honorable” man: in a few days, they would transfer him to a smaller house, far from Oslo, since the ministry couldn’t continue to cover the cost of the rent and maintenance of Lev Davidovich and his guards in that place. Then he threw the book on the table and went out into the snow.

Lev Davidovich attended the trial against Quisling’s men, even when he knew that the proceeding was just a smokescreen behind which the Norwegian laborites and National Socialists were shaking hands, happy to have cooperated in Lev Davidovich’s marginalization. Nonetheless, in his statements, he took advantage of the occasion to denounce the fact
that the trial was taking place behind closed doors at Stalin’s request to the fascistic minister Trygve Lie.

Because of that, a week later, when he was advised of a new visit from Lie, Lev Davidovich prepared himself for the worst. The minister remained standing, without removing his coat and without looking at Lev Davidovich, and told him that President Cárdenas had granted him asylum in Mexico and the Trotskys would leave immediately.

Although the prospect of moving to Mexico still seemed dangerous to him, the Exile tried to convince himself that it was preferable to die at the hands of a murderer than to continue living in that captivity that threatened to continue until it crushed him. The speed with which the Norwegians rushed to throw him out of the country—they didn’t even allow him a brief stay in France to see Liova—revealed the tensions that, because of him, Lie and the other ministers must have been living under for the previous four months. Nonetheless, Lev Davidovich thought that he could not miss his last opportunity and reminded Lie that everything he and his government had committed against him had been an act of capitulation and, like all capitulations, would have its price, since he knew that the day was quickly approaching when the fascists would arrive in Norway and turn them all into exiles. The only thing Lev Davidovich desired was that when that happened, the minister and his friends would find a government that would treat them like they had treated him. Trygve Lie, frozen in the center of the room, listened to that prophecy with a slight smile on his lips, incapable of imagining the overwhelming and dramatic way in which Lev Davidovich’s prediction would come true.